A design consultant who finds the real problem, then builds the fix.

What a design consultant should actually do.

The title gets used loosely, so let me define the job by its ending: a design consultant is hired judgment that finishes in shipped work. You bring one in when a metric is stuck, a product has grown confusing, a brand undersells the business, or a team needs direction, and you want someone senior to find the real problem, say it plainly, and fix it.

Plenty of consultants stop at the audit and the recommendations deck. I don't, because advice that never touches the product is just opinion. I diagnose, I set direction, and then I design and build the fix, or work shoulder to shoulder with your team while they do. You should judge a design consultant by what shipped, and that's how I ask to be judged.

What I consult on.

Product and UX consulting: research, flows, design systems, and delivered interfaces. When sign-ups stall or users churn, I find out why, redesign the path, and measure whether it worked. If you searched for a UX consultant, this is that work.

Brand and marketing sites: I've designed and launched sites for national brands end to end, the design and the build in the same hands, see my agency work.

Design leadership and teams: strategy, hiring, mentoring, and the craft bar, as a consultant or embedded part-time as a fractional head of design.

And AI-first design, my differentiator: I've taken a multi-billion-dollar design org AI-first and founded an AI-native company, and I help teams make AI genuinely useful without losing the craft, more on my AI design consulting page.

Consultant, agency, or full-time hire.

An agency sells a team and a process, which is right for big, defined projects and priced accordingly, with account managers between you and the people doing the work. A freelancer sells hands, right when you already know exactly what to build. A full-time hire is right once design is a daily, permanent need. A design consultant sits in the gap those three leave: senior judgment applied part-time, with owned outcomes, without agency overhead or a hire's commitment.

I'll tell you which one you need, even when the answer isn't me. If you're weighing design leadership specifically, start with the hiring overview or go straight to fractional. And if you're comparing firms, I wrote an honest guide to choosing a product design firm.

How an engagement works.

We start with a short diagnostic: I read your analytics, your research, and your product, talk to your team, and come back with what's actually wrong, which is often not what the brief said, and the order I'd fix it in. Then a focused first project, one flow, one surface, one problem, scoped in weeks, so you judge the work instead of the promise.

From there, engagements settle into project pricing for defined work or a monthly retainer for ongoing product and leadership help. I keep the first scope small and visible on purpose: it should be small enough that whether it worked shows up in your numbers.

Proof, not promises.

I rebuilt flagship e-commerce experiences inside a multi-billion-dollar apparel platform with double-digit conversion lifts, see that work. I took over a stalled paid-social launch and drove a hundred-plus paying subscribers in the first week at Supply Drop.

I founded Story Genie, an AI-native company where agents write and illustrate personalized hardcover children's books, live and delivering today. And through my agency, Surf Studios, I've delivered brands and products end to end for clients across North America. What the people behind those projects say is on the kind words page.

What I will not do.

I won't sell you a rebrand when the checkout is the problem, or a research phase when the answer is already sitting in your analytics. I won't hand you a strategy deck and disappear. And I won't pad the engagement: if the fix is two weeks of work, I'll tell you it's two weeks of work.

I'd rather solve the problem and have you come back with the next one than stretch this one. Consultants earn trust by ending engagements well, and most of my work comes from people who came back.

Ways to work together.

Project consulting through Surf Studios: a defined problem, diagnosed, designed, and fixed. Ongoing fractional leadership, see how that works. Or full-time, I'm open to Director, VP, and C-suite design roles, see my resume.

Where I work.

I'm based in Austin, Texas, and I work with teams anywhere; most engagements are remote with occasional on-sites. If you're local, I keep a page for Austin design consulting too.